During the recent American presidential campaign, the defeated presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, attacked the views of her opponent, former president Donald Trump, by declaring that ‘he believes that girls mustn’t have agency over their bodies.’
I discovered this claim really surprising due to extent of what Harris appeared to be claiming. Agency means the flexibility to act, and so denying someone agency over their bodies means reducing them to a state of complete paralysis through which they’re incapable to creating their bodies do anything in any respect. As everyone knows, Trump is kind of capable of claiming some completely outlandish things, but I used to be not aware that even he had expressed the concept all women must be subject to total paralysis and the Harris campaign didn’t subsequently produce any evidence that he had in actual fact done so.
The truth, after all, is that Harris was not making the claim that her words suggested she was making. What she was actually attempting to say was that Donald Trump believed in outlawing abortion.
This claim was itself misleading, as he had not in actual fact given his support to an abortion ban, but has argued that this can be a matter for the people of every of the states to determine. What interests me from the standpoint of Christian ethics, nonetheless, is the best way through which Harris’ misleading claim about Donald Trump’s position reflects the assumption that is commonly appealed to by supporters of abortion that girls must have absolute freedom to determine what to do with their bodies and subsequently a right to determine to have an abortion.
This belief seems to me to be improper on two grounds.
The first reason is that I believe it’s improper to argue that any human beings, whether men or women, must have absolute freedom to determine what to do with their bodies.
This is a belief that in actual fact no one actually holds, even when notionally they subscribe to an absolutist view of human bodily autonomy. At some stage they may say of some motion by another person that she or he mustn’t have done that, or that she or he mustn’t be allowed to do this.
Given that each one human actions involve the usage of an individual’s body, because of this what they’re really saying after they object to what someone is doing is that human bodily autonomy mustn’t be seen as absolute. There must be limits to how people exercise the agency have over their bodies. For example, even probably the most ardent libertarian feminist will argue that rape and all other types of sexual violence against women must be completely prohibited and that men who use their bodies to perform acts of sexual violence must be prosecuted to the total extent of the law.
From a Christian perspective they’re completely right to argue in this manner. However, their argument is incompatible with the view that human beings must be free to do they need with their very own bodies. Clearly, they do not really imagine that.
Furthermore, from a Christian viewpoint they shouldn’t really imagine that. This is because because the Anglican theologian John Webster notes, what underlies a belief in complete autonomy of the usage of our bodies is a belief in absolutely the primacy of the human will. As he puts it, in response to this belief:
“Being human just isn’t a matter of getting a certain nature or being placed in an ordered reality of which I’m not the originator; relatively, the distinguishing feature of humankind is, that last resort, the need. The agent is characterised, above all, not as a type of substance but as enacted intention. The subject is agent, and in her motion is demonstrated her capability for the self-determination which is freedom: in free motion, the human subject is self-positing.”
As Webster goes on to say, in this contemporary view of freedom, freedom is portrayed:
“… as an opposing of the self to forces which seek to inhibit, contain or envelop the self and rob it of its authenticity, its self-constituted and self-legislated identity. The dynamic of freedom is thus one among acting against a countervailing force, whether that force be nature, custom, law, society or God.”
To quote Jonathan Grant, in response to this contemporary view: “The worst thing we are able to do is to adapt to some moral code that’s imposed on us from outside – by society, our parents, the church, or whoever else. It is deemed to be self-evident that such imposition would undermine our unique identity.”
From a Christian viewpoint this insistence on the need for human beings to exercise complete moral autonomy ignores one easy critical fact, which is that nonetheless much we wish to disregard or deny the actual fact, as human beings all of us exist in relation to God.
In the words of the Psalmist, “It is he who has made us and never we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). We aren’t our own creators by the acts of our own will. We only exist as creatures held in being by the Triune God who’s Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and as such we’re inescapably in relationship with him. We can no more avoid the proven fact that we have now a relationship with God as his human creatures that we are able to avoid the proven fact that as human beings we’d like air and water to remain alive.
To quote Webster again, what follows from the proven fact that we’re God’s creatures, made by him to live in a specific way is that:
“….we’d like to put aside the idea around which a lot of our economic, political and sexual identity is organized, namely the idea that freedom is autonomy. Freedom, is, relatively, that capability to understand what one is. What we’re is reconciled creatures, those let loose for true humanness by the work of the Triune God. To be let loose just isn’t to exercise the false freedom to invent myself by my actions, nor to be creator, reconciler and perfecter to myself. Nor is it mere unrestricted will. It is, relatively, to be what I actually have been made to be, to fulfil my vocation as a creature of God, and so (and only so) to exist in authenticity.”
If we ask what it means to fulfil our created vocation as God’s creatures there’s a basic two-fold answer given by Jesus. We are called to like God with all our heart, our mind and our strength, and we’re called to like our neighbours as ourselves (Mark 12:28-34). These two commands go together because loving our neighbours as ourselves means participating within the work of God by enabling them to flourish as God’s creatures in the best way God intends for them.
This brings us to the second reason why I believe it’s improper to argue that human freedom means the fitting to abort unborn children. This reason is since the unborn child just isn’t a part of a lady’s body. Both natural reason and Scripture tell us otherwise.
As Sean Doherty notes, natural reason tells us that:
“…. our lives as people begin when our physical life begins – that’s, in the meanwhile of fertilisation. Fertilisation is when a recent life begins physically. A fertilised egg just isn’t an element of the mother or the daddy in the best way that the sperm or the egg were – something recent has begun. No recent starting takes place after this: all that ensues is the natural development of the brand new life which has already begun. Significant milestones similar to the emergence of the primitive streak, organ development, quickening, viability and birth are clearly developments towards maturity, not the start from scratch of something recent.”
This testimony of natural reason is then underlined by the testimony of Scripture. We see this n Psalm 139: 13-16 where the Psalmist declares that from the moment of conception he was an individual (an ‘I’) existing in relationship with God:
“For thou didst form my inward parts,
 thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.
 I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.
 Wonderful are thy works!
 Thou knowest me right well;
 my frame was not hidden from thee,
 after I was being made in secret,
 intricately wrought within the depths of the earth.
 Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;
 in thy book were written, every one among them,
 the times that were formed for me,
 when as yet there was none of them.”
What follows from the proven fact that every human being is thus an individual from the moment of conception is that each unborn child is our neighbour whom we’re called to like by enabling them to flourish in the best way God intends all his human creatures to flourish.
To put the identical point negatively, because every unborn child is our neighbour they’re the topic of the sixth commandment, ‘You shall not kill’ (Exodus 20:13). This commandment forbids us from misusing our capability without cost bodily motion by taking the lifetime of some other human being except as an act of judgement upon very serious wrongdoing. What follows from that is that we cannot rightly take the lifetime of an unborn child since they’re by reason of their stage of life necessarily incapable of wrongdoing of any kind.
If we are saying that it is true to exercise the agency we have now over our bodies to take the lifetime of an unborn child then we’re either being radically inconsistent or we have now to carry that we have now the fitting to kill other people just because we wish to, a position which so far as I do know no serious moralist has ever held and which the Christian faith totally rejects as incompatible with the sixth commandment and God’s call to like our neighbours on which it is predicated.
The only circumstance through which it could actually plausibly be argued that it will be right to take the lifetime of an unborn child can be in very rare circumstances through which the ‘doctrine of double effect’ comes into play.
This doctrine applies in circumstances where a morally good motion has an effect which causes unintended harm. For example, if a mother has aggressive uterine cancer it may very well be the case that the one approach to save her life can be to remove her uterus. This would mean that her unborn child would die, but that child would have died anyway if the mother had been killed by the results of the cancer. In this case each lives can’t be saved and the moral good intended is to avoid wasting one life relatively than none, with the death of the unborn child being the undesired consequence of that call.
In such circumstances using bodily agency in a way that ends in the death of an unborn child may be justified as a form of affection for neighbour (the neighbour being the girl whose life is saved) but, to repeat, such situations are, thankfully, very rare they usually don’t negate the traditional moral judgement that, because the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “Human life have to be respected and guarded absolutely from the moment of conception. From the primary moment of his existence, a human being have to be recognized as having the rights of an individual – amongst which is the inviolable right of each human being to life.”
